


Last Man Standing

by Archangel67



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 2014, End!verse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 04:26:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archangel67/pseuds/Archangel67
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel knows Dean's plan, but that doesn't stop him from joining the raid to take down Lucifer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Man Standing

Castiel’s existence was like some sort of sick cosmic joke.

He had been prepared to die. More than ready. Then again, he had been ready every single time before too. Someone wanted him to keep his footing firmly on this plane of existence, whether he wanted it any longer or not. God, Lucifer, it didn’t really matter who it was. The fact was that when they rushed the compound, he knew what Dean had in mind. It had been years since he could legitimately read anyone’s mind but he knew the hunter inside and out. It didn’t take a genius to realize that their fearless leader was willing to sacrifice everything to get to his brother.

… .

No one ever said Dean Winchester was particularly sane. When it came to his family he was like a wild animal. A rabid dog with razor teeth and a particularly nasty vendetta. Cas had seen it getting worse over the years. Losing Sam had been the last straw. Watching his younger brother hand himself, body and soul, over to Lucifer on a silver platter fractured Dean’s already tenuous grip on reality. It hadn’t mattered that Sammy did it to protect him. That the rebel angel would have torn out the green eyed man’s throat with his bare hands if Sam didn’t acquiesce. All Dean could see was that Sam said yes, which meant he wasn’t Sam any longer.

That’s what all of this was about. It wasn’t about killing the Croats or finding other survivors or taking back the ground that they had lost. Dean didn’t care that the walls were closing in around them and any day the camp was likely to be overrun. They were running out of supplies. Medicine, bandages, soap. Chuck was about half out of his mind, begging anyone and everyone to keep an eye out for anything useful when they were beyond the razor-wire topped fence.

Kill Lucifer. That’s all Dean cared about. Find the Colt and put a bullet right through the devils smirking face. After he had been possessed, Dean burnt every last picture he had of Sammy. There weren’t many of them, but he had held onto a few when the younger man had gone away to Stanford, plus there were a few more recent ones that Jo or Ellen had insisted on taking. Sam had looked pretty much the same in all of them – tall, gawky, grinning like an idiot. Every single picture had curled and flickered and gone up in smoke.

That meant that Dean would rest easy knowing that the man he was shooting wasn’t just Lucifer wearing his brother’s face. There was no Sam anymore and there hadn’t been for a long time.

So fearless leader said go in through the front. So they went in through the front. The place was so thick with Croats it was amazing that they managed to even get beyond the sanitarium door. Like every last infected beast in the city had come together in a murderous welcoming party just for them. It was touching. Really. All they were missing was a fruit basket full of human organs.

Using a gun didn’t come naturally to anyone. There was no knack for being a good shot. It took a hell of a lot of effort and a steady hand to learn how to handle a fire arm with any real proficiency. Contrary to popular belief, Dean hadn’t taught him how to shoot. Cas had taught himself because the hunter had his head so far up his own ass that he had barely noticed that the angel had had every last ounce of Grace wrung out of him like he was a damp dish cloth. The blue eyed man had enough to keep him animate, to keep him grounded in the vessel that used to be Jimmy Novak, but no more than that. Injuries could no longer be miraculously healed via what Dean used to fondly refer to as Castiel’s “angel mojo”.

Hell, he couldn’t so much as fix a broken finger nail.

There were just too many of them. They swarmed in, angry and hungry and clawing at anything they could get their grimy hands on. It was hard to remember that all of these things had been people once. Individuals with families and lives and stories. Hopes and dreams that had no doubt been crushed under the heels of fate, no different than the survivors back at camp. No different than himself. If you didn’t shoot, you were dead.

So you shot. And you just kept shooting. And you tried not to think about who they were before the virus had seeped into their veins and turned them into mindless, gnashing monsters.

Bang. He looked like a business man. Maybe a husband and a father. Bang. She wasn’t even old enough to go to college. Bang. What did he want to do with his life? Bang. A tarnished cross pendant hung from her throat but there was blood on her mouth.

Bang.

They lost two good men no more than ten yards into the building, before they had even reached the stairs. Another was pulled screaming through an open doorway he hadn’t remembered to clear. They always screamed. Every single time. He would have screamed too… You learned to shoot them quick, right through the eye, to kill them before the Croats could do any real damage. Small mercy.

They cleared out the first floor and half of the second when things went wrong. He had let himself become distracted, passing by the tall, dusty windows that looked out into the courtyard gardens below. It was so gray outside that he shouldn’t have noticed much of anything, but it was hard not to spot the tall man in the pure white suit. Stopping short, he moved closer and peered out, dropping his gun to his side as he put his hand against the glass.

Lucifer was there. Right there. But he wasn’t the only one.

“Dean…”

There was no way the hunter was going to hear him. Not up here. All he could do was watch in helpless horror as the man he had pulled out of hell pulled out the Colt and was almost immediately subdued. The man in white was suddenly behind the hunter, jerking his arm behind his back and causing the gun to drop and skid away across the slick grass.

“No…”

When it came down to it, death wasn’t like in the movies and if someone wanted you dead, they didn’t spend ten minutes telling you how they were going to do it. Lucifer threw Dean down like a rag doll, pausing for only a moment, lips moving with words that Cas couldn’t make out from where he stood, completely frozen. That’s when the man in white lifted his foot and brought it down, right on Dean’s neck. The hunter struggled but Lucifer’s weight shifted and the green eyed man went still.

“No!”

His voice was drowned out by the sound of gunfire a few yards ahead. Risa was struggling to keep a dozen or so Croats at bay all on her own, the last of their companions prone on the cement floor with a bullet hole through the side of his head.

“God damn it, Cas, pay attention!” she growled as she fell back, scrambling to shove a new clip into her gun. “Your useless pill popping ass is going to fuck up this entire operation.”

It was already fucked up. It was already over. Lucifer had won. Dean was gone.

He was… gone.

Castiel couldn’t move. It was like his entire body had turned into one solid piece of unbending metal. He had felt fear before – the night they trapped Raphael, the day they lost Sam, when he had watched the world going to shit and there was nothing they could do. It wasn’t fear that he felt now. It was… nothing. He felt absolutely nothing. Risa was shrieking, but it seemed far away. Taking his head as if trying to clear cobwebs, his blue eyes turned from the window in time to see her being dragged kicking and screaming down to the ground. He brought up his gun, firing one shot clean through her forehead.

Honestly, Cas doesn’t remember how he managed to get out of the building alive. He had been running low on ammo as it was, but he wasn’t willing to waste even a single bullet on putting himself down. Everyone last one of these things needed to die. Each shot was clean, easy. When the last one went down, he was panting, his blood rushing in his ears. The silence that spilled over the scene was sickening.

He was the last man standing.

… . .

Dean’s neck was twisted at an unnatural angle. Aside from that he could have just been sleeping… in the rain, on the ground in the middle of a sanitarium garden. It had begun to storm but Cas hardly flinched at the crash of thunder over head. The sharp flashes of lightning illuminated the hunter, enhancing skin already gone pale and cold. There was nothing of the angry, bitter, broken man that Dean had become over the last few years. All Castiel could see was the face of the frightened, helpless soul he had raised from hell. The one who he had given everything for.

“You idiot,” he murmured as he stood over the fallen hunter, fist clenching at his side.

Crouching down, he put a bloodied hand on Dean’s shoulder and sighed. They had been through so much… and this was the end? Dean Winchester with his neck broken outside of a nuthouse, besides some tacky rosebush whose vibrant red blossoms stood out like a sore thumb against the bleak landscape. It wasn’t poetic. It wasn’t romantic. It was sudden and violent and final.

At least this time it was final. Because regardless of where Dean ended up, Cas wasn’t an angel any more. He had no strings left to pull in Heaven. There was really only one thing that the blue eyed man could do.

… . .

Dean had never talked about dying. No what-ifs or whens or hows. He had refused to acknowledge that he couldn’t win this war. After all of the lucky breaks that he had caught, he had a good reason to be that arrogant. He had never been a religious person, so putting him into the camp cemetery would have been a farce. Dean would have hated the idea of his body rotting in the dirt, food for worms. Even though the hunter had never said it outright, Cas knew that Dean would have preferred a hunter’s funeral.

Back at camp, he refused to let anyone help. Admittedly, Chuck was the only one who bothered to offer. No, he did it all on his own. Building the pyre, laying him on it, soaking everything down so it would light. It was kind of funny… The scent of gasoline and motor oil had always clung to the hunter’s jacket so it didn’t even seem out of place now. Castiel considered laying the horned amulet on the pyre with Dean – the same one that he had dropped into the trash can, only to come back and dig out less than an hour later. He hadn’t worn it since that day, but he had kept it safely hidden away in the top drawer of his dresser. Cas just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he slipped the leather string around his neck and tucked the cold lump of metal down beneath his shirt.

“Maybe one of these days… I’ll see you again and kick your ass for making such bad decisions,” he said with a weak laugh as he took one last look at the man who lay unresponsive on the stacked branches and tinder. Cas leaned down, just barely brushing his lips against Dean’s forehead. “One of these days.”

The last five years didn’t seem to matter now. Not when he stepped back away from the pyre, not when he flicked open the silver lighter that the hunter had given him after he had “borrowed” it from the home of a rich family who had all gone Croat right in the beginning. A good hunter always kept a lighter on him, Dean had said, and Cas needed his own. Never knew when you were going to need to set something on fire.

Despite the rain, the wood caught quickly. Smoke rose as the flames licked at the green canvas jacket, the worn leather boots, and jeans that had been patched one too many times. Seeing those flames ringing his head like a halo… just like the first time he had seen him in hell. Yet there was nothing he could do to save Dean now. This was the end of the road.

Or at least it should have been… but he was still alive. He was still breathing even if it felt his blood had run cold. No amount of alcohol or pills or mindless sex was going to set this right. Cas wished he would have realized that before so he could have at least said goodbye instead of filling their final hours with biting remarks and arguments.

There was a warm hand on his shoulder, causing Castiel to turn. Chuck was there, his mouth twisted into a sympathetic frown.

“Every story has an end,” he said as if that was going to make the blue eyed man feel better.

Cas smirked, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out the Colt. It’s long, slender barrel glinted against the fire as he turned it over in his hand, checking the chamber. Just one bullet left. But it would only take one bullet to put Lucifer down for good.

“Not this one. Not yet.”


End file.
